The Urban Future Lab is pleased to announce, for the sixth year, the Urban Future Prize Competition, which seeks to find the brightest climatetech startups and, through the generous support of The New York Community Trust, MUFG, and NYSERDA, award two winners with $50,000 cash prizes. These awardees will also receive admission into the ACRE Incubator, New York’s longest-running and most successful climatetech program. The deadline has been extended to June 20.
RACER will award $25 million in funding for projects to enable communities to utilize solar and solar-plus-storage to prevent disruptions in power caused by extreme weather and other events, and to rapidly restore electricity if it goes down. Projects will foster engagement and ongoing communication among multiple stakeholders such as utilities, municipal planners, emergency responders, community groups, and others, especially in underserved communities located in areas vulnerable to extreme events causing frequent energy and power service disruptions. In addition, projects will develop and demonstrate rapid energy restoration technologies based on the community resilience plan in order to increase the durability of photovoltaic (PV) systems.
The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Advanced Manufacturing Office (AMO) has launched phase two of the Industrial Technology Validation pilot. This phase is open to all industrial sites that want to team with technology vendors to evaluate innovative manufacturing technologies in their plants. Technology vendors are also invited to apply individually.
Applications are accepted on a rolling basis until June 30, 2022.
The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Water Power Technologies Office (WPTO) is launching the Hydropower Operations Optimization (H2Os) Prize to encourage the development of new solutions that can help advance hydropower’s contribution to the grid. Hydropower provides beneficial operational flexibility in timing and storage of energy that can be better leveraged to meet grid needs. This competition challenges innovators to employ modeling, data analytics, and machine learning to schedule hydropower operations in coordination with existing grid scheduling practices while respecting water management operations and constraints.
XPRIZE Carbon Removal is aimed at tackling the biggest threat facing humanity – fighting climate change and rebalancing Earth’s carbon cycle. Funded by Elon Musk and the Musk Foundation, this $100M competition is the largest incentive prize in history, an extraordinary milestone. This four-year global competition invites innovators and teams from anywhere on the planet to create and demonstrate solutions that can pull carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere or oceans, and sequester it durably and sustainably. To win the grand prize, teams must demonstrate a working solution at a scale of at least 1000 tonnes removed per year; model their costs at a scale of 1 million tonnes per year; and show a pathway to achieving a scale of gigatonnes per year in future.
Small grants and pro-bono professional support for smaller nonprofits is available from the ERM Foundation. This foundation invests in organizations and programs that focus on:
Applications are accepted on a rolling basis to this grant program for grassroots projects. Grants do not exceed $5,000, and the organization aims to award $100,000 in funding throughout 2022.
Story of Stuff gives grants to BIPOC led and serving groups with a budget of $50,000 or less that focus on water privatization, plastic pollution, and other environmental justice focus areas.
The Cornell Douglas foundation is seeking applications from non-profits working on environmental health and justice, land conservation, mountaintop removal mining, sustainability of resources, watershed protection, and financial literacy for elementary and high school students. Their grant size average is $15,000 – $50,000.
Nonprofits are eligible to apply for this prize focused on creating a national innovation messaging campaign for the Urban and Community Forestry Program (U&CF). The campaign should also address national priorities of environmental and climate justice.
Partnership collaboration is required and projects are to be completed within 2 years. All grant funds must be matched at least equally with non-federal sources.
For the LG Chem Global Innovation Challenge – Sustainable Solutions, we are on the lookout for game-changing players with disruptive technologies that are ready to scale their impact and leverage the network, expertise, and funding of Korea’s largest chemical company. Benefits: leverage and access LG Chem’s global network, various types of funding with the size of 9 billion USD up to 2025 in total, collaboration opportunities with a variety of experts to scale up your technology, work with LG Chem’s both Business and R&D departments.
Apply to a new program from the DOE related to community-scale climate research. Research will focus on three tightly related scientific topics—atmospheric and environmental observations; modeling of climate change and impacts across urban regions; and simulating the climate benefits of deploying climate solutions and technologies in historically underserved communities across the U.S.
Urban IFLs will require multi-disciplinary teams that bring together the skills and talents of investigators from multiple research institutions. Academic and nonprofit research institutions, national laboratories, other federal agencies, and the private sector are all eligible to apply as Urban IFL team members. The lead organization of each proposed Urban IFL team must be an academic institution or a national laboratory. Locally-based team members and minority serving institutions (MSI) are expected to have significant roles in each Urban IFL.
Funding is to be awarded competitively and is expected to be in the form of five-year awards. The Department anticipates that $17 million will be available for this program in 2022. Requests should not exceed $5,000,000 per year.
